Not long enough

As I was going into the library,

I saw a girl in a black T-shirt.

I didn’t read what was

printed on it.

It was a little long –

for a T-shirt.

Her jean shorts were cut off

near the knees –

also a little long for shorts–

but her royal purple leggings

extended to her ankles –

need I point out that they

were longer than her shorts?

Her blond hair was braided

into two tied pig-tails –

not too long.

Actually, quite short.

And strung over her shoulder

and hanging long down onto one hip

rested what appeared to be

a cloth turtle passing for a purse

with a long tail –

for a turtle.

The girl was laughing with her friends.

When I came out of the library,

she was gone.

I think I should have perhaps stopped

to tie my long shoe laces before

I went into the library.

I then might have not have tripped over

my short span of attention.

I could have just sat on a bench

near the library door,

five minutes would not have been

too long to see what I might have seen.

Write dumb poems or die

I started to dig my grave today.

I stepped outside my back door

and looked all around

and up and down

and in a flash of morning sunlight

on a curved vane of dulled aluminum

bobbing on the breeze,

it seemed clear to me that the time had finally

come.

I looked reluctantly over the white heads of clover

peeking through the green blades of grass.

I mourned the peonies spent and low on the lawn.

But weeds were thriving.

I bent to pull several handfuls

from around the scrap iron sculpture

near the pea soupy garden pond.

With some slight decorum

I dropped the weeds

onto the yard waste pile yet to break down

behind the garage,

painted finally for what would be the last time

only last summer

by me not yet 59.

The dark, rich compost had been shoveled

and spread

just this very departing spring

in the flower and vegetable beds.

So there was ample room at ground level now

for a substantial hole –

and fitting.

But rocks and tree roots

would make the digging hard.

I looked over by the faded fence

to where a small stone

marked the place where

our first cat had surely

by now been mostly decomposed,

leaving mostly bones.

But with the rhubarb

to one side

and the oak leaf hydrangea on the other –

no room.

My resting head near a perennial, perhaps.

The baptisia rising

from the earth,

spires of false indigo petals -

purple appearing in blue sky light.

Too close to the driveway.

Plodding past, I saw the rain gauge,

nearly full.

Perhaps some bugs had come

to drink and drown.

But now, no longer planning to live forever,

I tilted my head and drank the shot down

and slammed the empty cylinder back.

The inevitable was unavoidable.

My end, no longer inconceivable.

The air was brisk for May -

probably what had begun to make my nose

sniffle.

I hawked and spat.

Death.

Deliberately I turned towards the garage,

my back slowly receding from the rising

sun.

The shovel hung there on two nails

on the inside wall.

But, no!

No, I would not do

what I wanted not.

Let the grave digger

come after me.

I mowed the lawn instead.

New Mexico rivers

The Santa Fe river, downstream from a reservoir. It's nearly narrow enough to jump across in places, The river does not provide enough water for Santa Fe. There is an aquifer that is being depleted by wells.

The Rio Grande From the High Gorge Bridge near Taos. Reported flow: 544 cu feet/sec. (Kaw about 23000 cfs today)  Bridge lengths about the same, Height above the water is considerably different.

Life requires water. Rivers are not just scenery.

A comfortable chair near the poetry

I stopped off in The Dusty Bookshelf. I found Billy Collins sitting hardbacked on the shelf for $7.95, used. He made me smile at almost nothing as I stood for free – with an occasional tug in the other direction. But I was more in the mood for something – or someone – softer. Not overly animated, but responsive to my pensive looks.

A fragment of Beethoven’s 7^th drifted down from a speaker on the top shelf. I think it might have been called the funeral march. I turned a chair around from a corner in the nearby Romance section and faced it towards the door.

I slouched. I think that I have always slouched. I crossed a shin over a knee and, with a book – balanced - I made a desk. I didn’t have anything to say. Nothing to compete with the bright May sunshine outdoors and the breeze there tickling the fresh green leaves filling out winter’s bare branches. The first hot day of this year, it was – or, at least that’s my recollection. The outside sounds, a whisper. I could have waited the rest of the day and into the evening for someone to walk by that door – someone I knew and could actually talk to - and me, not merely panhandling someone’s reluctant friendship.

This is where you came in, I suppose. From where I sit, the letters backwards on the glass, I imagined that you were smiling at me – and maybe for a moment, I got a little more than I actually deserved. Or perhaps you thought I was too busy to interrupt, my brow may have been furrowed, my pen scribbling on a scrap. Ah yes – we were but strangers in a used bookstore. Rhyme and reason – but not for the two of us. Still, the day through the door in front of me was bright.

I clicked my Pilot G2 and folded some words into a rectangle. I slipped paper and pen into my shirt pocket.

**

I’m making up this loneliness stuff – really – it comes and goes like the shadows of people walking by. I have a smile on my face more often than not and the downward squint of my left eye I simply got from my father. It’s mostly because of the bright light that I’m not hurrying towards just yet.

I’ll take some words away from these books – someone has carefully noted what they had to say in their time. But right now, carelessness would suit me better – maybe a kid tripping over a crack in the sidewalk and laughing. So many of these words are some kind of filler. Occasionally,  perhaps, a reminder to open your eyes to life outside yourself.

Still, it’s been quite pleasant chatting with your imaginary self. But someone else has surely been waiting for someone, too.  I think I’ll get out of this chair and go open somebody else’s door.

On the edge

Not the center of the world,

they faced towards each other.

If you drift, if you stare,

the tree outside the window

branches into four,

another branch branches again.

Across the street

a red minivan,

maybe a little burnt orange,

or maybe there’s some dark rust.

Does it matter?

Where are your eyes,

if not in the forefront

of your mind?

Sometime near daybreak

The stars were like gemstones,

the proverbial diamonds in the sky,

how should I profess my wonder?

The sky, the velvet in the jeweler’s shop

only more resonant with beads of moisture

too minute to see,

except the sky glowed,

the blackness not complete,

and hanging, dangling, in the east,

from a silver strand invisible,

unless you opened your eyes,

a perfect crescent pendant

low in your ample bosom,

Cassiopeia high overhead.

I swear to you I didn’t see the morning

approach like this,

approximate,

my bare feet ice cold

in the dew water grass,

what light, Oh Shakespeare,

what light yonder breaks

the crystal night,

and these poor words

my richest praise.

And still I thought of you,

my heart, be still not,

I will see you

as soon as I can bear,

it is me you will see

if you open your eyes,

my love for you,

not like exquisite

lightening dark,

but these are my feet

and my opened eyes

for you.

Checking on the moon

 

This month’s waning moon was just rising over the neighbor’s house when I stepped out late into the early spring night. The air was cool and still. I could hear students partying into the night many blocks away. Our neighbors have two girls. I think that the younger one will finally learn to ride a bike without training wheels this year.

I looked for the constellation Cassiopeia, but I couldn’t make her out. Maybe she is still hidden below the eastern horizon. Maybe I will see a young woman that I know in the summer. She has been studying abroad across the Atlantic. She fell off her bicycle last fall and broke her collar bone.

And there’s a new moon every month.

And my neighbor up the street is starting to show. Due late summer. I wonder if it will be another girl - or a boy this time.

Now, back inside with the light on, my window is opaque. My cat sits warm on my lap as I make a few notes so I don’t forget what I remembered.

And now Rita has jumped over the arm rest to curl up in my wife’s purple chair.

I really should go back to my bed.

Sunny and 70 is the morning’s forecast. But this is Kansas. Anything could happen.